This blog now uses FeedFlare to add "sharing" links to the bottom of every blog entry (see the bottom of this blog entry). FeedFlare is a feature of FeedBurner, which is a tool/service designed to help increase traffic to blogs. The idea behind FeedFlare is to make it easy for people to share blog posts with friends. For example, a Digg user can "Digg this" post, simply by clicking on the "Digg this!" link. No need for them to manually copy the URL. People are more likely to do something if it is easy and takes little time.

This website has now been in existence for two months. Over the month of July, the number of pages has increased from 36 to 57. Most of this has been due to blog posts. Writing a blog post takes considerably less effort than adding/updating projects, because they do not require much extra work, other than writing and a bit of research. Added to this, my spare time has been very limited, so I have not had much time to work on my projects. One of the projects has also been held up due to significant technical difficulties (more on that when I it is ready to present). Hopefully this will change in the coming month, as this blog was never meant to be the focus of this website.

Today I decided to have a look at social networking type sites such as Reddit. Reddit allows users to submit links to interesting pages and vote them up or down. The idea sounds good; popular articles should rise to the top whilst unpopular/uninteresting ones will fade into obscurity. Despite the site simply looking like yet another news feed, I decided to take a closer look.

Getting a car that is stuck in mud moving, requires considerable effort. Once the car is in motion, however, greater traction is gained, and the car can be accelerated more easily. Likewise, increasing traffic to a new website is rather difficult and requires effort; but, once a certain level of traffic has been achieved, increasing traffic further becomes much easier.

In true ironic form, a few days after posting a commentary about blogs copying blogs, that very commentary has been copied by another blog. On closer inspection, the blog in question appears to simply copy posts from blogs relating to cell-phones. Compare this post from PhoneDONE, with this one on Waiguoren, as an example. It is almost like the blog is run by a bot that collects blog entries from various sources. The commentary that I wrote linked to one of the sites that Vaiguoren (yes, the blog is titled, Waiguoren, but the poster is Vaiguoren) copies from.

It has been a week since this blog was added to Technorati, Blogged, and Zimbio. So far, my predictions have been slightly off-mark. As expected, not much extra traffic has been seen from any of these sources. However, it was originally thought that Blogged would provide the most traffic. Instead, most traffic (out of these sites) has come from Technorati.

When trying to increase traffic to ones blog, does the day/time on which a blog entry is posted matter? I tried an experiment in order to determine this, but the results so far are inconclusive. In the experiment, two blog posts contained links to the Huffington Post, and Gizmodo, two of the highest-ranked blogs on Technorati. These links within the posts cause them to be listed as "blog reactions" on the Technorati listings for the Huffington Post and Gizmodo. The hypothesis was that more people would be likely to see these posts on weekdays, as opposed to weekends. This would be due to more people reading on weekdays relative to the number of people posting "blog reactions."

... because no-one is reading. Ok, so this is not entirely true. However, it would appear that the number of readers does drop off over the weekend. Why would this be an issue? After all, the posts could easily be read on the following Monday. Well, this relates to trying to increase traffic by linking to other blogs. It appears that posts written over the weekend are likely to quickly become buried under other posts, before others notice that they are there.